09.10.05 - Rejoice in the Lord Always

I??ve told before the story of the rather inebriated woman who accosted me at a wedding reception and wanted to know how it could be that someone as good-looking, intelligent and humorous as I could be a minister. (She knew the right things to say!) I replied that I had never been told that the prerequisite was being ugly, thick and gloomy.

I??m not sure about the ugly bit, but it does seem to be a popular conception ?± or misconception ?± that to be a Christian, let alone a minister, one has to have somehow suspended common sense and intellectual faculties, and has to be humourless. I find that misconception reinforced by people who occasionally comment on our propensity to laugh at St Lukes, in church and out of church, saying that it is such a relief to be able to laugh in church. I am bemused by the fact that it seems that humour is something not usually associated with Christianity and with worship. I would certainly want us to take being Christian seriously, but taking something seriously doesn??t mean having to be solemn about it. Sometimes I think one of the ways one can stay sane as a Christian is by being able to see the funny side of even quite serious and solemn things like what goes on in church or in theology.

"Rejoice in the Lord always," writes Paul to the little house church in Philippi, "again I will say, rejoice."

Did the Philippians need to be told that it is a good thing to be elated, to be glad, to be happy? It seems the Philippians needed to hear it. This was not because they were a gloomy lot. Rather, it was because of Paul??s concern, writing as he was from his own imprisonment and so himself unable to get to them, that the small Philippian church which he had founded and of which he was extremely fond might not be able to withstand various external and internal pressures. In various places earlier in his letter he has urged them to be steadfast. He then has just referred to what appears to be a serious dispute between two leaders of the congregation who, by the way, were women, which reminds as that at its beginnings the Christian church did not see leadership as a male preserve. He pleads for these two women to reconcile their difference (whatever it was). In then calling the congregation to rejoice, not to worry about anything, and so on, he was addressing this tension and anxiety, and pointing them back to some of the foundational essentials of faith.

Do we need to be told that it is a good thing to be elated, to be glad, to be happy? Certainly some, who see Christianity as something dour and serious, need to hear it. Certainly those who are like the proverbial Scots Kirk elder, who fears that "someone, somewhere might be having a good time," need to hear it. In some forms of Christian culture the worry about control and balance has been such an emphasis that anything like joy which is spontaneous is embarrassing. By and large, in our head-centred, wordy Protestant Christianity, people generally find it much easier to express joy in a heavily structured manner, such as in the words of a hymn, or in the swelling of the heart during an anthem by the choir or voluntary on the organ. Paul is surprisingly strong in his affirmation and expression of emotions. In his day it ran against the grain of those popular philosophers, like the Stoics, who cautioned restraint in all matters regarding feeling as a way of lowering one's vulnerability to bad experiences. In our day, it runs against the grain of our inbred Anglo-Saxon and northern European sense of appropriate restraint in manifesting feelings like joy.

Sometimes our distaste for excess leads to a neglect of this very vital human experience. We need to know about joy just as much as we need to know about anxiety, confusion and pain. "Rejoice in the Lord always?ñ" Paul's "always"  is not an assertion of the kind that implies joy in every moment, that implies the relentless happiness some Christians, and Americanised culture at its worst, try to convey as the norm. Joy is never alone. Its companions are pain and fear. At times Paul's letters display more of some than the other. Paul's sense of joy is not the absence of pain or fear. Rather, it is his understanding and experience of the presence of Christ, in whom he places his hope and trust. For Paul, the deep human need to belong, the joy of belonging, is met in Christ. That oneness takes him into pain and death, and, as he often emphasises, leads him over and over again on a journey from death to life, from pain to joy. Sometimes in his letters his joy stays barely alight, a flickering flame amid an oppressive darkness of criticism and downright hate. But it remains, and can flare into brightness at relief and change.

What brings it to burn brightly is the knowledge that here and there love breaks through, and people are rescued from the negative effects of religion ?± pagan, Jewish and Christian ?± and are set free to be loving people. For Paul, joy and love belong closely together. And so he writes that he wants the Philippians to let their goodness, their gentleness shine. The focus is outward. For the One in whom he wants them to rejoice is that very same One whose life reached out.

"Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God." Coming, as it does, from Paul, the exhortation not to worry is interesting. It hardly means, don't have serious thoughts or don't be anxious. Just look at many of Paul's letters and you will see how seriously involved he was and often how worried he was about what was happening to the people of his churches. It could be quite a burden ?± writing to the Corinthians he spoke about it as "anxiety". So Paul is hardly peddling a lifestyle option of the unengaged life of serenity. His spirituality is quite the opposite. But part of his joy is that it keeps him from total despair, from the kind of worry that becomes obsessive and self-destructive. Openness to God in prayer keeps him centred ?± just as it kept Jesus centred in Gethsemane.

Anxiety and depression are more common occurrences among us than we usually recognise. Many of us live to a lesser or greater degree with what Winston Churchill called his "black dog" accompanying us wherever we go. Exhortations to joy, or not to worry, can at best lead to a cynical laugh or at worst lead to an unnecessary feeling of guilt because I know I just can??t make it. On the other hand, reading them in the context of it being Paul who is making the exhortation, while himself is frequently anxious, allows us to see joy not as a superficial relentless happiness, but an attitude of openness to God, and to the knowledge that whatever we are feeling and whatever is (or we suppose is) conspiring to derail our lives, we belong; our origin, our present, and our end are all in God. We are God??s, and God is ours, even when it doesn??t feel like it.

When Paul speaks about "peace" in this passage, we know he is not talking about that favourite religious pastime of learning to be still and happy and finding oneness beyond this world and its uncertainties. When he speaks of this peace keeping people's hearts and minds, he is almost saying: it is this that will keep you sane! It is neither a disengaged serenity nor an intellectually worked out, solution-focused state of having answers to all the problems. Rather it is a peace that goes beyond the calm of rational resolution and cannot really be achieved by it. Ultimately it is the peace of or from God. It is that sense of the presence of God, of awareness of oneness with the Compassionate One who is engaged "up to the neck" in our life, and who is bigger than our imaginations and our solutions. Paradoxically the love which makes itself vulnerable, the joy which both flares and flickers, and the peace which gives no rest as long as there is injustice and need, all belong together inseparably as the fruit of the spirit. As Paul wrote to the Galatians, "?ñthe fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace..."  

In all this, Paul integrates theology and practice. Paul is not just advocating something like the power of positive thinking. This is about more than mere technique and persuasion. It is about filling one's mind with what Paul sees as the signs of God's life - not so that one will feel good, but because this is another way of filling oneself with God's life and so allowing God's life to flow through us to the world around us. In today??s passage from the letter to the Philippians, Paul is offering a kind of grounded and intentional spirituality. It is this combination of theology and practice, it is this grounded spirituality, which emphasises a God-centredness, an openness to God, that lies behind Paul's understanding of peace and, ultimately, also of joy ?± that often neglected but very important sign of the Christian life grounded in God, and grounded in people, and open to glories and the absurdities that are part and parcel of life and of faith.